„You were the man I saw across the river?” Sharpe asked.
„The very same. Your Portuguese fellow came across. Smart man! So he rowed me back and now we’re floating those damned barges.” Waters grinned. „It’s heave-ho, my hearties, and if we can get the damn things afloat then we’ll have the Buffs over first, then the rest of the 1st Brigade. Should be interesting when Marshal Soult realizes we’ve sneaked in his back door, eh? Is there any liquor in the building?”
„All gone, sir.”
„Good man,” Waters said, mistakenly deducing that Sharpe himself must have removed the temptation before the arrival of the redcoats, then he stepped to the window, took a big telescope from a leather satchel hanging from his shoulder and stared at Oporto.
„So what’s happening, sir?” Sharpe asked.
„Happening? We’re running the Frogs out of Portugal! Hop hop, croak croak, and good bloody riddance to the spavined bastards. Look at it!” Waters gestured at the city. „They don’t have the first blind idea that we’re here! Your Portuguese fellow said you’d been cut off. Is that true?”
„Since the end of March.”
„Ye gods,” Waters said, „you must be out of touch!” The Colonel pulled back from the window and perched on the sill where he told Sharpe that Sir Arthur Wellesley had indeed arrived in Portugal. „He came less than three weeks ago,” Waters said, „and he’s put some snap into the troops, by God, he has! Cradock was a decent enough fellow, but he had no snap, none. So we’re on the march, Sharpe, left, right, left, right, and the devil take the hindmost. British army over there.” He oointed through the window, indicating the hidden ground beyond the high convent on the southern bank. „Bloody Frogs seem to think we’ll come by sea, so all their men are either in the city or guarding the river between the city and the sea.” Sharpe felt a twinge of guilt for not believing the woman in Barca d’Avintas who had told him exactly that. „Sir Arthur wants to get across,” Waters went on, „and your fellows have conveniently provided those three barges, and you say there’s a fourth?”
„Three miles upriver, sir.”
„You ain’t done a bad morning’s work, Sharpe,” Waters said with a friendly grin. „We only have to pray for one thing.”
„That the French don’t discover us here?”
„Exactly. So best remove my red coat from the window, eh?” Waters laughed and crossed the room. „Pray they go on sleeping with their sweet froggy dreams because once they do wake up then the day’s going to be damned hot, don’t you think? And those three barges can take how many men apiece? Thirty? And God alone knows how long each crossing will take. We could be shoving our damned heads into the tiger’s mouth, Sharpe.”
Sharpe forbore to comment that he had spent the last few weeks with his head inside the tiger’s mouth. Instead he stared across the valley, trying to imagine how the French would approach when they did attack. He guessed they would come straight from the city, across the valley and up the slope that was virtually bare of any cover. The northern flank of the seminary looked toward the road in the valley and that slope was just as bare, all except for one solitary tree with pale leaves that grew right in the middle of the climb. Anyone attacking the seminary would presumably try to get to the garden gate or the big front door and that would mean crossing a wide paved terrace where carriages bringing visitors to the seminary could turn around and where attacking infantry would be cut down by musket and rifle fire from the seminary’s windows and its balus-traded roof. „A deathtrap!” Colonel Waters was sharing the view and evidently thinking the same thoughts.
„I wouldn’t want to be attacking up that slope,” Sharpe agreed.
„And I’ve no doubt we’ll put some cannon on the other bank to make it all a bit less healthy,” Waters said cheerfully.
Sharpe hoped that was true. He kept wondering why there were no British guns on the wide terrace of the convent that overlooked the river, the terrace where the Portuguese had placed their batteries in March. It seemed an obvious position, but Sir Arthur Wellesley appeared to have chosen to put his artillery down among the port lodges which were out of sight of the seminary.